Monday, December 29, 1997

Automatic hyperlinks

Automatic Hyperlinks! here's what the Web should be like; it’s the next step toward Originist. Write a browser where you can select any block of text (even links, although they still also behave normally too) and turn it into a hyperlink. You would have three default options (possibly in a pop-up menu): One would give you definitions of the words and/or phrase you selected; another would (try to) take you to the most definitive link on the subject—say, for instance, you select “Apple Computer.” This option would take you to Apple’s homepage. If there were no clear definitive link for the subject, it would take you to: Option three, the list of links. This would require a much-better-than-current search engine, which would list links by relevance, with definitive links on top, then indices on the subject, or perhaps before those, dictionary entries, encyclopedia entries, and history of… links, both for the words and the concept, then lists of books, articles, etc.; then, maybe, a list of actual pages by appropriateness, only one page per site, and not based on how many times those words appear on a page, but whether they appear in the title or any descriptions of the page, etc. This part will be lots of work. But what about pictures, or just things people think of & want to know while browsing? There must be a way to type things in. All of this is presumably working toward the Originist. Money? Plug-ins?